MIST

Magnetosphere, Ionosphere and Solar-Terrestrial

Latest news

Winners of Rishbeth Prizes 2023

We are pleased to announce that following Spring MIST 2023 the Rishbeth Prizes this year are awarded to Sophie Maguire (University of Birmingham) and Rachel Black (University of Exeter).

Sophie wins the prize for the best MIST student talk which was entitled “Large-scale plasma structures and scintillation in the high-latitude ionosphere”. Rachel wins the best MIST poster prize, for a poster entitled “Investigating different methods of chorus wave identification within the radiation belts”. Congratulations to both Sophie and Rachel!

As prize winners, Sophie and Rachel will be invited to write articles for Astronomy & Geophysics, which we look forward to reading.

MIST Council extends their thanks to the University of Birmingham for hosting the Spring MIST meeting 2023, and to the Royal Astronomical Society for their generous and continued support of the Rishbeth Prizes.

Nominations for MIST Council

We are pleased to open nominations for MIST Council. There are two positions available (detailed below), and elected candidates would join Beatriz Sanchez-Cano, Jasmine Kaur Sandhu, Andy Smith, Maria-Theresia Walach, and Emma Woodfield on Council. The nomination deadline is Friday 26 May.

Council positions open for nomination

  • MIST Councillor - a three year term (2023 - 2026). Everyone is eligible.
  • MIST Student Representative - a one year term (2023 - 2024). Only PhD students are eligible. See below for further details.

About being on MIST Council


If you would like to find out more about being on Council and what it can involve, please feel free to email any of us (email contacts below) with any of your informal enquiries! You can also find out more about MIST activities at mist.ac.uk.

Rosie Hodnett (current MIST Student Representative) has summarised their experience on MIST Council below:
"I have really enjoyed being the PhD representative on the MIST council and would like to encourage other PhD students to nominate themselves for the position. Some of the activities that I have been involved in include leading the organisation of Autumn MIST, leading the online seminar series and I have had the opportunity to chair sessions at conferences. These are examples of what you could expect to take part in whilst being on MIST council, but the council will welcome any other ideas you have. If anyone has any questions, please email me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..”

How to nominate

If you would like to stand for election or you are nominating someone else (with their agreement!) please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by Friday 26 May. If there is a surplus of nominations for a role, then an online vote will be carried out with the community. Please include the following details in the nomination:
  • Name
  • Position (Councillor/Student Rep.)
  • Nomination Statement (150 words max including a bit about the nominee and your reasons for nominating. This will be circulated to the community in the event of a vote.)
 
MIST Council contact details

Rosie Hodnett - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Mathew Owens - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Beatriz Sanchez-Cano - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Jasmine Kaur Sandhu - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Andy Smith - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Maria-Theresia Walach - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Emma Woodfield - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
MIST Council email - This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

RAS Awards

The Royal Astronomical Society announced their award recipients last week, and MIST Council would like to congratulate all that received an award. In particular, we would like to highlight the following members of the MIST Community, whose work has been recognised:
  • Professor Nick Achilleos (University College London) - Chapman Medal
  • Dr Oliver Allanson (University of Birmingham) - Fowler Award
  • Dr Ravindra Desai (University of Warwick) - Winton Award & RAS Higher Education Award
  • Professor Marina Galand (Imperial College London) - James Dungey Lecture

New MIST Council 2021-

There have been some recent ingoings and outgoings at MIST Council - please see below our current composition!:

  • Oliver Allanson, Exeter (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2024 -- Chair
  • Beatriz Sánchez-Cano, Leicester (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2024
  • Mathew Owens, Reading (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2023
  • Jasmine Sandhu, Northumbria (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2023 -- Vice-Chair
  • Maria-Theresia Walach, Lancaster (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2022
  • Sarah Badman, Lancaster (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.), to 2022
    (co-opted in 2021 in lieu of outgoing councillor Greg Hunt)

Charter amendment and MIST Council elections open

Nominations for MIST Council open today and run through to 8 August 2021! Please feel free to put yourself forward for election – the voting will open shortly after the deadline and run through to the end of August. The positions available are:

  • 2 members of MIST Council
  • 1 student representative (pending the amendment below passing)

Please email nominations to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by 8 August 2021. Thank you!

Charter amendment

We also move to amend the following articles of the MIST Charter as demonstrated below. Bold type indicates additions and struck text indicates deletions. Please respond to the email on the MIST mailing list before 8 August 2021 if you would like to object to the amendment; MIST Charter provides that it will pass if less than 10% of the mailing list opposes its passing. 

4.1  MIST council is the collective term for the officers of MIST and consists of six individuals and one student representative from the MIST community.

5.1 Members of MIST council serve terms of three years, except for the student representative who serves a term of one year.

5.2 Elections will be announced at the Spring MIST meeting and voting must begin within two months of the Spring MIST meeting. Two slots on MIST council will be open in a given normal election year, alongside the student representative.

5.10 Candidates for student representative must not have submitted their PhD thesis at the time that nominations close.

Cassini’s Grand Finale:- Planetary Period Oscillations are everywhere and the dayside field ‘lags’

by Gabby Provan (University of Leicester) 

Saturn’s Planetary Period Oscillations are oscillations at close to Saturn’s planetary period which have been observed to organize all of Saturn’s ionospheric and magnetospheric parameters throughout the Cassini mission.  There are two oscillatory systems, one in the Northern hemisphere and one in the Southern. The enduring mystery is that so far we have yet to understand how a perfectly axisymmetric planetary magnetic field can create such oscillations

In this paper, we study the magnetic field throughout the Cassini Grand Finale orbits.  On these orbits Cassini passed from the northern auroral region in the dawn sector, through the gap between the D ring inner edge and Saturn’s atmosphere, and outbound to the southern auroral region in the dusk sector (See Figure 1). We observe dual PPO modulations on auroral, subauroral, ring-region and intra-ring region field lines – in other words everywhere (see Figure 2).  This is the first time that PPOs have been observed on and inside ring region field lines.  The presence of such field perturbations may provide an explanation for apparent PPO-related phenomena observed in the ring material itself, through the action of these fields on charged dust grains (see e.g. Chancia et al., 2019).

A schematic showing Cassini's pass through key regions of interest.

Figure 1: Plot of the periapsis pass trajectories of the initial and final proximal orbits, Revs 271  (blue) and 292 (red), projected into a meridian plane in cylindrical coordinates.  The darker blue field-aligned area corresponds to field lines mapping through the main ring region in the equatorial plane, between the inner boundary of the C ring and the outer boundary of the A ring, while the lighter blue field-aligned area corresponds to field lines mapping through the D ring.

Next, we considered the residual magnetic field, having discounted the magnetic signature of the PPOs and Saturn’s ring current from the observed magnetic field observations.  We found that the residual azimuthal field had a lagging configuration in the subauroral region with a magnitude ~3-5 nT.  These fields extend essentially unmodified inwards, crossing the ring region and the field lines mapping to Saturn synchronous orbit, to the outer boundary of D ring field lines.  The lagging field indicates a field-aligned current flow of ~0.25 MA rad-1 flowing from the southern ionosphere toward the C and inner B rings. The physical origin of the extended region of lagging dayside fields remains unclear. 

Magnetic field data.

Figure 2: Field data from all the proximal orbit periapsis passes, color-coded  according the northern PPO system phase.  The data are plotted versus time from their field-parallel points taken as t = 0 (central vertical black dotted line), over the interval between -100 and +80 min,  Vertical dashed lines indicate the equatorward boundary of the auroral region.   The green solid lines mark the field line passing through the outer boundary of the A ring, while the green dashed and dotted lines mark the field lines passing through the outer and inner boundaries of the D ring, respectively.  Data in Figures 2a-2c on the left are color-coded by northern PPO phase such that phases near 0°-360° are colored red and phases near 180° blue.  Similarly, data in Figures 2d-2f on the right are color-coded by northern PPO phase such that phases near 90° are colored red and phases near 270° blue.

For more information, please see the paper:

Provan, G.,  Cowley, S. W. H.,  Bradley, T. J.,  Bunce, E. J.,  Hunt, G. J.,  Cao, H., &  Dougherty, M. K. ( 2019). Magnetic field observations on Cassini's proximal periapsis passes: Planetary period oscillations and mean residual fields. Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics,  124. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019JA026800